Opaque Lucidity

Update

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past few days. I'm on road, visiting two of our out-of-state offices. If you posted something in the last four days and you don't have a TypeKey account already, your comment did not show up until tonight. I would comment on the economy, but I'm too tired to be rational. More later.

Firing Up The Bilge Pump

As I type this, President Bush is set to address the nation about our current economic crisis. He has asked both Senator Obama and Senator McCain to meet with him and the Congressional leadership tomorrow at the White House. For once, I think both sides might be pretty close to common ground. There are no good answers ahead of us---just varying levels of pain.

I'm not an economic expert, so maybe what I'm about to say is based more on emotion than rational thought. In the final analysis, I have a problem handing $700 billion over to the same people who helped create the mess we're in now. But as The Lovely Kelli said, what choice do we have? Let huge banks fail? I guess the answer is no. But we don't have $700 billion floating around in some secret reserve. Thus, you and I will be assuming the bad paper that was bought up by these huge corporations in better times.

UPDATE: President Bush, in my opinion, did a great job of presenting the American people with a clear, simple explanation of what we are facing economically. I'm still not wild about laying out nearly a trillion dollars to buy potentially bad debt, but we are definitely backed into a corner. My big question now is which candidate or Congressional leader will hold a press conference tonight or tomorrow and turn this into a partisan issue. My money's on Pelosi; she just can't help herself. We shall see.

I'm listening to the President right now. I may have more to say later.

The Glass House Campaign

Below is a letter to the editor I sent our local fish wrap in response to this column:

Pam Platt, in her September 23rd column, was quick in her summation of Governor Palin, calling her "this year's cynical choice to play the role of woman of the people". It is indeed the gullible liberal who does not realize that the same accusations made against Palin's history and purpose can be made, and justly so, against Senator Obabma.

The smear campaign against Governor Palin would be laughable if it did not serve as such a strong indictment of what the Fourth Estate (and this newspaper) has become: another thoughtless but useful tool of the Left.

I'm posting it here because I doubt it will see the light of day in the pages of the Courier-Journal. As my friend Carmine says, it's hard to trust even the page numbers in that rag.

New Guy

Remember this the next time the senior management guys want you to go with them somewhere...

Obama Unplugged, McCain Considered

Hugh Hewitt has posted an exact transcript of The Chosen One's speech to some of his Hollywood supporters earlier this week. If we take out the uhs (which almost every speaker inserts at some point), we are left with very little of substance. But since most Left Coast liberals lack substance anyway, I'm sure checkbooks flew open. To you Dems out there----this is your man, your Truman, your Kennedy. Congratulations.

I am nearly finished re-reading John McCain's first book, "Faith of My Fathers". The Senator from Arizona is no saint. There are issues with which I disagree with him, such as immigration policy, and I believe that he spent many years in love with the attention he received from the media for being a maverick Republican (where is all that adoration now, by the way?). But when I think of a 32-year old Lieutenant Commander, badly injured, beaten and malnourished who refused early release by his North Vietnamese captors so at to deny them a propaganda victory, my heart swells with pride. No, being a POW for nearly six years does not make John McCain the better candidate. Being a Navy fighter/bomber pilot and squadron commander does not make McCain the better candidate.

I could say that John McCain is a better candidate because he holds the same opinions as me on many important issues, such as national security and abortion. That alone would make me vote for him over Barack Obama. But there is something more, something that is hard to verbalize. In short, John McCain is the real deal. He did not abandon his faith in his nation even during his darkest hour. He stayed true to his oath as a defender of our Constitution under conditions that would have broken all but the strongest of men.

When the phone in the private quarters of the White House rings in the middle of the night, it's never about welfare or public education. It's about the nation's safety and tough decisions have to be maderight now. Barack Obama's short career as a Senator and time as a "community organizer" have left him fit to be what he is: a grand-standing politician. So when that phone rings and something terrible has happened, I want the person answering it to be a guy who understands terrible things and hard decisions. I think the choice becomes clearer every day.

The Blind Leading The Stupid

The power is back on at Casa Dattilo. While I get caught up with everything, here's something to keep your blood pressure up there. Good Lord, why can't we get a little meteor when we really need one?

Powerless And Request

We are now experiencing our third full day without power. I have connectivity at work, but we've been so busy I haven't had a chance to update here. Hopefully, things will be back in order soon.

I need to ask a favor: if you are reading this between now (9/16 at noon EST) and this Friday, please send me an e-mail with 'I am a regular reader' in the subject line. You don't have to put anything in the body of the message or tell me you love me (I know you do, man, I know you do); just the subject line is enough. I'm doing this to help solve a dilemma over something I wrote here some time ago. I may explain in vague detail later.

My address is matthew.dattilo@gmail.com. Thanks.

Runneth Not To The Contrary

I listened to one of my co-workers this morning as she told the story of her daughter's first day of kindergarten. When I returned to my PC, I looked down in the corner of the screen and realized that it's September 10th. What a date.

We tend to think of the world changing for us Americans on September 11th, 2001. If that's true (and I believe it is), then September 10th, 2001 represents the last full day of an era. For most of us, little things are different now, like airport security. But our nation was made very different by the events of 9/11, changes that affect almost every facet of our society: moral, economic, social, etc. Those of us who were adults on 9/11/01 remember the world that was and realize we were like naive kids on that Monday before.

I had the realization this morning that most children 10 and younger today have no recollection of the events of that terrible day. They have grown up in a world where terrorism inside our borders is a potential reality, not the stuff of action movies. They will take this in stride, just as children in Israel learn that there are radical Muslims willing to kill themselves in the hope of taking a few Israelis with them. The idea of planes flying into and destroying skyscrapers will not seem outlandish to them---it will be just another over-analyzed history lesson.

One member of my Texas family has a daughter who was born in 1995. Kelli and I traveled to Dallas just two weeks after 9/11 and one night we all went out to dinner. The conversation in the car turned to New York (most of the family is from the Bronx) and the daughter, who was six, said simply, "Planes fly into buildings there." It wasn't a statement of shock or anger, but simply a statement of fact. Planes fly into buildings here. In the United States. Our home.

Some of you might read this and think that it was time for us to wake up to the violence in the rest of the world, some of which this nation helps perpetrate. But despite our many wars and natural disasters, the American experience at home maintained a sort of blissful, if unaware, peace. Those children now in the early years of their education will never know that peace.

This Century's Tank?

Bob Woodward of Watergate fame was interviewed on '60 Minutes' last night about a forthcoming book. Please take a minute and watch this YouTube clip from the 1:40 mark to about 3:19. What the hell is he talking about? Talk amongst yourselves.

Forgotten War, Silent Men

I just finished David Halberstam's 'The Coldest Winter', a book which details the first year of the Korean War. If you know the history of that war, you know that 1950-51 was a crucial time. What's so heartbreaking is that you probably don't know anything about the war other than the fact it was fought.

I was in high school when the movement began to honor the veterans of Vietnam who had been ignored or ridiculed for so long. There were parades, newspaper articles and motorcycle rides, all in honor of the men who fought and died in Southeast Asia. My dad watched almost all of this in silence, only to say to me one day, 'What about the Korean War?"

Dad joined the Navy in January, 1952 and was off the coast of Korea by May of that year. The war had slowed into a World War One-like stalemate centered around the 38th parallel by then, but there was still plenty of work for the small destroyer on which dad served. His ship shelled North Korean rail facilities, picked up wounded Marines and traded fire with North Korean gun emplacements at the mouth of Wonsan Harbor. He was on his way back to Korea on another deployment in July, 1953 when the war ended.

The beginning of the Korean War found the United States in almost no condition to fight even a regional war. The nation that had finished the Second World War with the strongest military in the history of man had allowed that military to atrophy to a shadow of its former self in just five short years. The introduction of nuclear weapons in 1945 changed the public's perception of war to such an extent that many Americans believed the next war, if it was fought, would spell the end of civilization and would be fought in the air, not on the harsh terrain of the Korean peninsula.

The terrible habit we Americans have always had is to forget the lessons learned the hard way on the battlefield. Even though Korea was a very different war than what the US would face in Vietnam 15 years later, the two conflagrations had many things in common. In both cases, the enemy was not responsible to a nation's citizenry. There were no elections in Hanoi or Pyongyang for the politicians to worry about, unlike the elections in the US in 1950 and 1952. The American public does not like mounting casualties in any war, and so they vote accordingly. The Chinese fighting UN forces in Korea suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, yet they fought on with little regard for what had been lost.

The Korean War never officially ended. The truce that stopped the war has held for 55 years, but Korea remains the same divided place it was in 1950. The 1950's American public did not understand the concept of limited war or negotiated peace. After all, this was the nation that had pulverized another group of Asians and had dictated the terms of surrender at the point of a gun. To many, it seemed like the war in Korea was called at halftime for lack of interest.

Dad said one time that many people he knew back home during the war knew nothing about it even as it was occurring. Despite the fact that almost as many Americans died in Korea as would die in Vietnam has done little to change the seeming indifference that still lingers in the annals of our history. But something that bothers me more than the lack of honor shown the aging vets of a long-ago war is the loss of the lessons learned there. We are learning those lessons again today in Iraq and Afghanistan at the cost of thousands of American lives. How many lives could have been saved by the liberal use of military history? We'll never know, because it has never been tried. And we are a poorer nation because of it.

An Honest Joe

I disagree with Joe Lieberman on just about everything. Despite this, he may be one of the most honest men in Washington. He has a level of awareness that seems lacking in his liberal peers. He knows we are at war, a long-term conflict that requires unity and commitment, qualities which the modern Democratic Party does not possess. He and John McCain are not just personal friends, but men from opposite sides of the political spectrum who realize the importance of national unity in the face of barbarism. Here's some excerpts from his speech tonight at the Republican Convention in Minneapolis:

The Democrat-turned-independent says that while Sen. Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for troops in Iraq, McCain took the unpopular position to support a surge in troops.

"I'm here tonight because John McCain is the best choice to bring our country together and lead our country forward. I'm here because John McCain's whole life testifies to a great truth: being a Democrat or a Republican is important. But it is not more important than being an American," Lieberman says.

Senator Lieberman's support of McCain will not go unpunished. He's willing to accept whatever comes, which says more about him than any speech ever could.